Walking past the Kings of Wessex, I realised that it is nearly 18 years since I left school. Half my life-time.
There's nothing like coming back to where you grew up to make you feel old. It's hardly an original observation, but fuck me, it's true.
Similarly, my eldest nephew, who held my finger with his tiny hand when he was two hours old, is now a massive, lunking, handsome youth who will be 19 in a couple of months.
Where have the last two decades gone?
Every now and then you hear about people who fall into a coma as teenagers and wake up twenty years later, unable to grasp the fact they are now nearly 40. At least they have some kind of excuse. It's not like having experienced the intervening years that I am any more capable of appreciating the passage of time. How much time I have wasted in a self-imposed coma. All those days, weeks, months of my life I have wasted watching TV and playing computer games.
Luckily I have a job that provides some opportunities for adventure (but also more opportunity to waste time), or otherwise I would do nothing.
After the events of September 11th (by which I mean the specific event of the World Trade Towers falling over, not any of the many other events that happened in the world that day. I hate that euphemism.) I realised that there was a good chance that many or all of us were likely to die in the coming months. I made a vow to myself to try and live my life to the full. To experience stuff, to get out of my flat, to at the very least read some books.
A week later nothing had changed.
I suppose I am saying that it's easy to forget that life is finite, it's easy to get caught up in the immediate dead-line and not notice the bigger picture.
It's easy to say this and easy to just carry on wasting time as always. Maybe wasting time is a perfectly reasonable way of spending your time anyway.
